Pasta w/ jambon cru, courgette, tomates

Now here's something Dad might like: pasta with jambon cru!

Cut zucchini into small strips, similar to the way you cut cucumbers when you make maki sushi.

Peel tomatoes (boiling them in hot water to remove the skins is optional), and dice.

If available, mince a couple of sun dried tomatoes for added sourness.

Boil pasta (spaghetti -- 100g per person), adding just a hint of salt to make the pasta slightly salty.

Sautee the mix in a frypan with salt and pepper.

Mince one clove of garlic and add to mixture being fried.

Slice several slices of jambon cru into strips and add to the mix.

Serve the pasta and sauce together with parmesan cheese (but don't put too much, it'll make the whole thing too salty).

Blue cheese with parsley?

In addition to rack of lamb last night, for dessert, two fantastic cheeses from the local market, including the one in the photo, which is a blue cheese with parsley in it. It was really strange finding the leafy parsley wrapped up in one of the blue mold veins within the cheese, but this particular cheese was not especially salty and was absolutely fantastic with toasted German bread.

Still more surprises at Carrefour: this time, desserts

On my way back from school today I stopped again at Carrefour to pick up some oranges, which I'd been unable to pick up last week. I bought two kilograms of oranges (close to 4.5 lbs) for 2,50 EUR. They're very sweet, imported from Spain and no post-harvest pesticides.

The surprise of the day was the dessert section, which I usually pass by without trying. But since I'm here, why not, take advantage of the Buy 1 Get the 2nd for 1/2 price promotion to try something new?

So I bought creme caramel (flan) which was pretty much what I had expected it to be (after all we have the same sort of prepared pudding in Japan), and for the second box of desserts, chose what they call "gateau de semoule," where semoule refers to semolina flour, the main ingredient in pasta and couscous. From what I understand it's originally an Algerian dessert, but if I'm wrong, my apologies ...

It's like a rice pudding, thick and starchy at the same time, but incredibly tasty with raisins and caramel (and if I'm not mistaken, a hint of rum?) In any case, compared to the rather ordinary creme caramel, it was a pleasant discovery and something I'd like to try again. Notice the raisins in the picture: don't they look tasty?

The New-Fangled McDo: Chic and Wired

Not far from Place des Terreaux, about a fifteen-minute walk from my place, there's a brilliant renovated McDonald's. Up to now you've probably associated McDo (this is what the French call it) with red and yellow, but this one is different: cool, sleek black and white interior, elevator for the handicapped, and a free public WiFi.

McDo has been changing its profile from a hamburger shop to a place where people can also pick up a coffee and pastries. So (as with the Business Week article that I sent you recently), McDonald's is trying to increase its client base by offering different services to different sets of clients: burgers for those want a meal, but coffee and snacks to those who just want to rest for a few moments during their shopping.

I like it. And I hope they continue to renovate their other existing locations. When I was in Paris in December, they had already renovated their location at the Defense metro terminal. With Starbucks making inroads into France, McDo's got to keep on their toes!

And you thought the call centers were only outsourced in the US?

I think Uncle G. knows from his experience with a certain computer maker that companies today are outsourcing their support center work to workers in other countries. I cringe when I hear his story of being on the line for several hours and not getting his problem resolved.

Well: hey, even France outsources its support centers. I'd heard that my cable company outsources its technical support to Tunisia, but today was the first time since I've been in France that I've encountered such a thing when I called my mobile service provider.

After six months of owning a phone, you can have it "unlocked" (deverouillage), which will allow you to use that phone on any network within Europe (or in the case of tri-band phones, anywhere in the world that uses those frequencies.)

If you don't unlock the phone, when you put the SIM card chip from a rival operator into the phone, you will not be able to make calls from that phone. Although I expect to keep using this phone for the time being, I thought that it would be a good idea to unlock the phone since it would allow me to use chips from other companies (and not just other companies in France: I can now use a chip from the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy and so forth).

So I called the service center using Skype. (Calling from a mobile phone I would be charged 0,48 EUR / minute; calling from Skype (oddly enough), I was only charged 0,16 EUR / minute). The first time I got through, I spoke to a French operator, but the call got dropped by Skype halfway through. I called again, and within 30 seconds (thank goodness! nothing like being charged for being on hold!), a service agent with a thick accent came on the line. Mind you, he spoke perfect French, but the pronunciation was accented and he had a tendency to roll his r's, like in Spanish.

We got through the formalities (I gave him my address and phone number and date of birth, for confirmation), and he soon gave me the code necessary to unlock the phone. Within five minutes I was finished and was set to unlock the phone.

I thanked him and he closed the call courteously, leaving me impressed with the service that my provider offers. Fine to outsource the work if the overseas center provides you with the information you need.

And the phone?

Following a certain procedure (generally you put in a SIM card from a rival operator that the "locked" phone doesn't recognize), I then entered the eight-digit code that I had been provided with and within seconds, the phone became"unlocked." I can still use the SIM card that I have inside the phone, but now I can use any other card in it, as well. Very convenient! So in the time, any time you guys want to borrow a phone when you're travelling through Europe ..!

Cote d'agneau: rack of lamb, French style

My Russian colleague suggested we have dinner Sunday night and asked me to pick up some cote d'agneau, or rack of lamb, at a butcher near his house. Four small ribs cost 5,00 EUR or about $6.50: terribly expensive when you consider the price of the rack of lamb that you can buy at Costco!

But still it was really good, and this is how he prepared it.

You sprinkle salt and pepper on both sides of the meat.
Then (this is the key) you smear French mustard on both sides of the meat, and then pan fry it.

The saltiness and sourness of the mustard go well with the meat, and towards the end you can add some minced onions to suck up the lamb juices.

Try this with a couple of boiled potatoes with a slab of butter, salad on the side, and Bordeaux wine? You got yourself a meal for less than 10 EUR a head, much less than what you'd pay in a restaurant.

I'm sorry that I wasn't able to take a photo of it. Maybe next time.

Pigmalyon: Business Simulation Game

Last week (19 February), for four days straight, our class of MBAs were divided into teams and asked to join a business simulation game.

Each team was in charge of a glue manufacturing plant with identical market share and identical products. It was up to each of the teams, therefore, to decide which market it wanted to focus on, the prices it wanted to sell each of its products at, and whether or not to enter a new market for a product called C.

Along the way we had to forecast sales and production needs, and then actually back up the sales forecasts with the right number of sales staff. Too few, and they felt less motivated and sold less. Same with the workers in the plant who manufactured the glue-based products: run them too hard, and their productivity actually goes down, wastage of products increases, and absenteeism increases. All of which have direct costs that decrease your profits.

So the trick is to find the right balance of incentives to keep both sales and workforce satisfied without cutting too deep into your profit margins.

One team pulled out of the least profitable market; our team entered the new market and took huge market share and enjoyed high profit margins.

It's hard to say at the end who won the game: was it the team with the greatest market share, or the most cash on hand (no debt), or a team like us, with a strong presence in each of the three markets and a stable, profitable company?

But of course who won was not really the point of the game. The point of the exercise was to pull together all the things that we had learned in the foundation courses back in October - December, and to apply them, under time constraints, to managerial decisions which were hardly cut-and-dry.

After this game, I respect the CEO or section chiefs who have to be on top of all aspects of running a company in order to keep it profitable. Making do with ambiguity is definitely part of the makeup of a successful leader.

Yesterday's finds at -- you guessed it -- Carrefour!


Yesterday, I had a meeting with my project group (we're doing a consulting project during the course of the year), and in the afternoon I came back, had some lunch, and then went shopping for supplies before the Saturday rush. Actually, with all the school kids on vacation (skiing?), the shopping center should be a little more empty than usual, but ... I'm not interested in finding out.


So I did some shopping at the usual places -- Lidl, where I buy some vegetables at prices close to the open market prices (that's why I've stopped going to the market in the wintertime, but don't worry once spring comes again I'll be hopping out there again), and for bacon at a store called Ed (feels sort of like Grocery Outlet), then finally at Carrefour.


Although I bought bread and some dishwashing detergent (Carrefour's special sale: buy one, the second at half price), what I was surprised to find were the following two items:


- Cote de Blayes wine

A very full bodied wine from the Bordeaux area with a very distinct flavor, and one of my favorites, and inexpensive at 2,90.


-RICARD pastis

Pastis in a special edition yellow bottle designed by "Garouste and Bonetti." Normally selling at a premium of 14 EUR (compared to 10 EUR for a similar sized bottle), this product was also part of the 'buy one, second at half price' promotion. If you do the math, it comes out about equal to the normal green bottles. And you have a nice bottle you can use in the future for pastis ... or I suppose even for flowers.


The other bottle in the picture is table wine that I'd picked up at Lidl, appellation "Cotes du Roussillon," from Perpignan.

France pulls through!

No, this is not about soccer, this is about the individual cases that I've had to pursue on my own.

I received the bag that I had submitted for repairs to the boutique just yesterday. It was professionally wrapped and filled with packaging materials and sent in a beautiful company box. But alas! no free goodies inside as compensation (shucks!)

Then another reimbursement I was waiting on came through, after I had written that organization a polite letter in French explaining how I was due four months of payments because I had started my studies in September. An equally polite reply arrived last Wednesday arrived to inform me that, yes, my assertion was correct and that funds would be wired by the end of the week. And they were.

Just one more: the cable company has claimed it has processed the reimbursement, but it still hasn't arrived in my bank account. Cross my fingers and wait a little more? Or do I have to go in again to their office. (LOL)

School lunch

Two days ago, after they ran out of spaghetti, the authorities at the cafeteria combined the leftover meat spaghetti sauce with ... a mysterious yellow steamed pudding that had a hint of mint inside it? I have no idea what it was but it was terribly interesting, to say the least ...

Yesterday, they had some delicious, tasty lentils with bacon, served with boiled ham and sausage. A nice winter dish!

OL Lyon Finally Breaks Its (Losing) Streak

This was the scene at last week's Lyon game versus mid-ranked Lorient, a team from the northwestern region of Bretagne. Fans have been flagellating themselves (no, just kidding) over the team's devastating January (three losses, one tie) and were praying for a miracle, going to such lengths as to send streamers of paper all throughout the stands (see photo). The incredible thing is that these strips of paper were the kind of threaded strips that you find on printed paper when you have invoices, or especially the old dot-matrix printers that we use to use back in the, err, 1990s.

The poster in the other photo is a "call to arms" by fans, and is meant (I suppose) to invoke similar feelings as the Resistance posters that appeared on French buildings in Occupied France during World War II. (Of course, this call to arms, in jest.)

Oh: and the result? Fortunately, Lyon scraped out a victory, 1-0. Their inability to score goals (since the end of November) has been noticeable and worrisome. Tonight (Friday), they take on third-placed Lille, which has booked itself a place in the final knockout round of the Champions League, and next Wednesday, they travel to Rome to take on AS Roma, the team with Italian captain Totti.

On the studying end: Corporate Finance!

I haven't written much about what I've been studying over the last two months, but the truth is that I've had only two classes and a consulting project for the local business development organization. No, I have not just been watching soccer games and eating mussels!

For these first two months, I've had two classes in corporate finance. Before you start rolling your eyes: no! I felt the same way choosing these courses. Me, with no accounting experience, choosing finance? Was I crazy, or what?

In my school you can choose between Finance, Strategy, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship as areas of "specialization" or something akin to a major. Not that specializing in any one particular course will make you into a full-fledged expert on the subject, but by choosing to focus on a major -- which, incidentally, is NOT required (if you don't specialize, you get a degree in "general management") -- you are able to build on the previous courses that you've had in the same area and get a much better, "global" view of that particular discipline.

The first course I took was on Valuing a Corporation. Normally, when you look a balance sheet, you find assets and liabilities, which give you an idea of the official size of the company. But is this reflected by the share price? Not always, since if you multiply the number of shares by the share price, you find that this number easily outstrips the official figures of the company that you get from combining the equity (the amount of money shareholders or owners have put into the company) and debt (the amount of financing that the company has chosen to receive in order to fund its activities).

I hope I haven't lost too many of you with that last explanation, but the main point to take away is that a company is more often than not worth more than the numbers that it shows on the paper. Through its money-making activities it actually manages to create intangible "value" which is not reflected by the balance sheet.

The second of my finance courses, which ended yesterday, deal with securities valuation (another term which I initially shied away from but now feel much more comfortable with). Like the previous class, the first part of the course dealt with means of pricing a company and therefore the pricing of its stock (how the market assigns a value to a company), and the last two sessions dealt with bonds, options and convertible bonds (bonds which can be converted into stock). Lots of technical stuff here (at one point our young French professor started deriving many of the formulae on the blackboard, covering it with greek letters, ryo, theta, myu, and so on), but I finally realized it was more important to understand what was going on behind all the formulae. Once I did, all this scary stuff about taking the logarithm of such and such and then taking the square root and adding it to the variance of the .... seemed insignificant, since in the end (hopefully) .... in our future jobs we will have computers (!) to do the hard work for us ...

Moules Provençales

Well, after trying out moules marinieres (with white wine) at home the other day, I got together with my Russian classmate to make moules provençales this time, or something close to that, throwing in an extra amount of tomatoes and garnishing the whole mixture with parsley.

It was just as good as before and before I knew it my colleague had eaten half the bowl. The broth left after all the mussels had been eaten was as good as before.

crepes!

One of my classmates held a crepe party tonight, and invited the class to join him and his family at his house in a suburb of Lyon. It was good to see half the class make the trip out to enjoy the crepes but certainly I (and I'm sure a few others) were happy to take up what was to be a very generous offer of crepes in the Brittany style.

A crepe, contrary to what the Sascha Baron Cohen (aka Borat) character says in Talladega nights, is nothing like a pancake. It is light, cooks quickly and you can combine it easily with both salty or sweet items. I arrived a little bit late but still managed to have three crepes, two of them flambee (made with cognac) and one with plain sugar and lemon juice (a nice touch, simple taste, not complicated).

Persistence pays off! Refund in the mail (Overcharge resolved)

Just a few days ago, I wrote about overcharging by the cable company.
And guess what: persistence has paid off!

Much to my great surprise, a letter appeared in my mailbox today, letting me know that 4 months of overcharges would be refunded, sometime in the near future.

Hopefully there will be no further overcharges (I certainly hope they delinked my bank account information from the erroneous account), and it will certainly be nice to have a big refund into my bank account, sort of like an unexpected tax windfall. Hmm, now where was that nice bag I was thinking about? Or that side trip to Greece? (ha ha ha)

More mishaps in France! (Never Fails to Surprise)

Two funny things happened today.

A bag that I had had repaired in a Paris brand-name boutique while I was there in December called me to let me know that my bag was ready to be picked up. Since I live in Lyon, I asked them to send it to me by courrier, and I sent them a cheque for several euros.

They treated it professionally and sent out the package yesterday. I received it at my local post office, opened it excitedly and -- voila! inside was a repaired brown shirt ... but not my bag! I called them and the staff member who answered replied puzzled but apologetically, and asked me to send the package back to him by "contre remboursement," which is a complicated system of reimbursement for postage and handling.

To do that I had to take the package to the local post office, pay the fees of the postage in advance, declare the amount to be reimbursed, and hope that the money will be reimbursed by the boutique after it arrives there. At 21 Euros, I thought the freight costs extremely high. I mean: 1.5 kg package to Paris? We can do better than that in Japan, where things get shipped from Tokyo to Kyushu for half the price, and better than that, door-to-door. (Some things could be greatly improved here!)

The second incident: no water!

I came home for lunch and microwaved my leftover Thai basil chili pork. When I went to soak the dishes, I lifted the handle on the sink, only to discover, no water! What? No warning on the elevator that there was any construction. Worried, I called the local water company, Veolia, to ask if there had been any problems with my payment or with construction in the area. No, they replied, ask the people in your building, maybe someone was working on something and turned off the water.

It turned out that some workers somewhere on the first floor had been doing some construction work and had turned off the water. Fortunately two hours later the water came back on (gurgling noise of the toilet gave it away), and all was back to normal.

If not, how inconvenient it would have been. How to wash dishes? Take a bath? Or even just go to the toilet? Never take your water for granted!

France 0, Argentina 1 -- FIFA match amical

I was able to catch a digital feed on my USB key TV set tonight and watched the exhibition soccer match between France and Argentina, both excellent teams high in the FIFA world rankings.

Despite an early goal by Argentina's forward Javier Saviola, the French controlled the ball for most of the game and kept the pressure on the Argentinians for the majority of the game ... but still they were unable to create bona fide opportunities for their front line to score. And even with their star-studded lineup, they came up empty time and time again against a determined Argentinian back line.

Still, these matches are opportunities to try many different new combinations of members and also give younger players some playing time before they are called up during international matches like qualifiers for regional championships. I remember in Japan's friendly matches, a coach could make up to six substitutions in one game. Unfortunately the previous Japan coach, Zico, never took advantage of that and kept his favorites in the game, even if the result was poor (no surprise that he was unable to use the younger players in his team during the World Cup last June).

Foodstuffs

Well, aside from the mussels, I picked up some honey during Carrefour's 3 for 2 promotion, and I'm curious what these flavors are. "miel fruité et fleuri", "miel doux et frais", "miel forêt et sapin." One is supposed to be fruity, another darker and deeper. Who can tell the difference in taste between these?

Down in the little Chinatown near Guillotiere metro stop, I stopped to pick up some long rice. They have everything there, albeit a little bit expensive. This pack of long rice (large pack) was something like 500g for $2.50. But compared to $0.90 for a single pack of 50g (2 oz) in Carrefour ... this is cheap! And you can't substitute for this when you make chicken long rice!

Syrups (Non-Alcoholic) to Mix with Pastis

A couple of my classmates hail from Marseille, in the south of France, home of pastis, the anise-flavored liqueur that is mixed with water for an explosive aperitif! (At 90 proof, you don't want to drink too many before dinner.)

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They gave me some hints about syrups that you could mix with pastis to make some delicious and sweeter cocktails. With orgeat, an almond-flavored sweet liqueur, you can make a Mauresque. There are others, but I'll leave it to you to check the link below to find out what you can make with pastis.

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Because of its strong, distinctive flavor, pastis doesn't make the best mixer like vodka. But there are some interesting combinations listed there.

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Price of almond liquor orgeat at gourmet boutique: 4,20 EUR ($5.80)

Price of mint syrup at Lidl discount supermarket: 0,98 EUR ($1.30)

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LINK:

Cocktails recipes using pastis are available at the following link:

http://www.1001cocktails.com/cocktails/categorie-recettes-Cocktails-au-Pernod.html

On this home page there are also a number of other cocktails using Calvados and other hard-to-find (in the US) liquors and eaux-de-vie.

Mussels

Yesterday, I picked up mussels at Carrefour for 4 EUR ($5.20) for 1.4 kg. Of course there were some mussels in there that had been crushed in transit and just to play safe I didn't put them in the pot, so in the end I'd say I was left with about 1 kg of fresh, cleaned mussels.

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The mussels themselves are raised in Spain but processed ("cleaned and purified," according to the package) in France. It's very similar to what producers in Japan do with clams from China: they bring them over from China, let them chill out in Japanese waters for a spell, and then repackage them as "clams processed in Japan (origin: China)." (Food safety's a topic for another entry maybe. I mean, in America, do we publish the country of origin on the foods that we find at the supermarket? Maybe sometimes. But in Japan and in France here you know exactly where the food comes from. By law they are obliged to specify the origin of the foods.)

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So how did I prepare them? Well, a variation on moules mariniere, without the cream.

1. Wash and clean mussels.

2. Fry chopped onions and garlic in a frypan, add about 100-150 ml of wine for 500g of mussels. Heat until wine is boiling.

3. Add mussels in pan, and cover. Steam for about five minutes (don't overcook; rubbery mussels can be unpleasant).

4. Serve and top with grated parsley, if you have. I suppose you could also mix a little cream into the "mussel soup" in the frypan.

Problems with the Cable Company

Ever had problems with overbilling? By, say, a couple of hundred dollars?

The cable company has been double billing me by a hundred Euros a month for the last three months for Internet service and I decided that I'd better preempt their next automatic bill payment, or else I'd get socked with another big deduction next week (second week of February).

Even though it was a Saturday morning, I got up early and made sure I was the first person waiting outside the cable company's office when it opened at 10 AM. If you're not there early, you can find yourself standing in line for an hour or so.

The first time I went there two weeks ago, a guy took a look at my account but didn't do anything. He took a look at my account, typed in a few comments, and then said it would be taken care of.

Skeptical of his cursory work, I went back yesterday and my case was handled by a customer service agent who immediately recognized the problem for what it was: somehow, my bank account info had been linked to the account of another subscriber, and I had been paying their bills with my account.

During a recent merger of various cable companies, the accounting systems had been merged, and somehow my account information got linked to another person's account.

The service agent promptly typed out a note, this time much more detailed, with the amounts of the three double-billings to be refunded to my account. She also (I hope) deleted my bank account number from the other person's profile. I'll find out this Friday whether or not it was successfully removed.

She advised me nonetheless to follow up in a few weeks to see if the matter had in fact been cleared up. I won't be able to rest easy until I get the refund check in the mail or receive some kind of recognition that they messed up!